IR Research and Innovation in Commercial Online Systems: An Exploratory Survey

Abstract

From the 1994 CAIS Conference: The Information Industry in Transition McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. May 25 - 27, 1994."Conventional" information retrieval systems (IRS), originating in the research of the 11950s and 1960s, are based on keyword matching and the application of Boolean operators to produce a set of retrieved documents from a database. In the ensuing years, research in information retrieval has identified a number of innovations (for example, automatic weighting of terms, ranked output, and relevance feedback) which have the potential to significantly enhance the performance of IRS, though commercial vendors have been slow to incorporate these changes into their systems. This was the situation in 1988 which led Radecki, in a special issue of Information Processing & Management, to examine the potential for improvements in conventional Boolean retrieval systems, and explore the reasons why these improvements had not been implemented in operational systems. Over the last five years, this position has begun to change as commercial vendors such as Dialog, Dow Jones, West Publishing, and Mead have implemented new, non-Boolean features in their systems, including natural language input, weighted keyword terms, and document ranking. This paper identifies some of the significant findings of IR research and compares them to the implementation of non-Boolean features in such systems. The preliminary survey of new features in commercial systems suggests the need for new methods of evaluation, including the development of evalutation measures appropriate to large-scale, interactive systems.